MONTREAL – Wide-angle mirrors, the kind standard on all school buses in Quebec, could have gone a long way in preventing the death of four pedestrians, killed by snow-removal trucks last winter.
As a coroner’s inquest into those fatalities resumed Thursday, an engineer with the École Polytechnique de Montréal, testified that visibility was an important factor in all the accidents.
On. Feb. 3, 2009, Jean-Paul Pinet, 71, and his wife, Solange St. Onge, 72, were struck and killed while crossing Sherbrooke St. – on a green light – enroute to Notre Dame Hospital. Hours later, Lucie Rivard-Lanouette, 76, died in virtually the same way, hit by a large semi-trailer turning onto Iberville St. from Fleury St.
Rajaa Benkiran, 49, a mother of two who was killed Dec. 15, 2008, by a snow removal truck as she crossed Jean Brillant St. near the Université de Montréal.
In three of the deaths, the victims were in areas of limited visibility to the driver or in complete blind spots when they were run over by a grader or tractor trailer. In the case of one type of truck commonly used to plow the streets of Montreal, the driver could see very little within five metres over the hood of his truck
As coroner Jean-Luc Malouin said, “You could hide a whole car in that blind spot." But at least two of the three accidents could have been prevented with the use of wide-angle mirrors on the trucks’ hoods.
More details to come.
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